Opinion: Recovery

U.S. President George W. Bush and then-Minority Leader John Boehner on Oct. 30, 2007. (credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

This is what a recovery looks like.

Slowly but surely the economy is picking up steam. Today’s job numbers are another data point that Barack Obama and Democrats have put the country on a path to recovery from the economic carnage of the Bush Administration.

News that unemployment is at 7.7 percent shows that the voters were right to back President Obama on the economy.

Over the past year there has been a full point drop in unemployment.

If the brain dead Republican Congress can get it together and raise revenues while responsibly cutting spending and investing in infrastructure projects that create jobs we could see a full-fledged Great Recovery II.

If Congress gets this right and follows the President’s lead we could see the kind of economic expansion that happened in the 1990s after Bill Clinton and Congressional Democrats alone passed a tax increase that put us on a path where the Government had surpluses as far as the eye could see.

That all came to a grinding halt when George W. Bush passed a massive and expensive tax cut and continued the Republican tradition of creating huge deficits that drag the U.S. economy down.

Bush heaped additional pressure on the economy by waging two wars on a credit card and not asking Americans to sacrifice and contribute to the cost of our national security in Afghanistan or the cost of Bush’s folly in Iraq.

When the consequences of the Bush Administration’s lack of regulation on the financial industry contributed greatly to a global financial meltdown America had reached the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

It took Republicans less than eight years to completely undermine the U.S. economy, which had previously enjoyed a Great Expansion.

As Obama implements a plan that is proven to deliver for our economy the brain dead Republicans in Congress continue to try to wreck the economy by threatening to manufacture another debt crisis and by refusing to vote to continue lower tax rates for the middle class.

The only economic plan Republicans have is tax cuts for the wealthy. It is the same trickle down lie they have been selling for decades.

But as data points like today’s jobs numbers come in it becomes clearer and clearer to the public that when it comes to economic policy the United States has only one party with a plan. The good news is it is a proven plan that is, again, delivering results.

About Bill Buck

Bill Buck is a Democratic strategist, President of the Buck Communications Group, a media relations and new media strategies consulting business based in Washington, DC, and Managing Director of the online ad firm Influence DSP. He has over twenty years of international and national communications experience. The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CBS Local.